Reflections – 2019.03

Pray Then Like This

Prayer is not easy.  From very early on in my Christian life, I have wrestled with how to pray, with remembering to pray for people, with a general sense that I don’t pray enough.  How can I do this?  What is prayer supposed to look like for the Christian?  I remember as a young Christian learning the ACTS model for prayer – adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication.  This has been helpful, reminding me that prayer is not simply asking for things, but involves praise and repentance and gratitude.  As a pastor, I look out every Sunday morning and am aware of some of the needs, desires, joys and pains of the people of God and know that I cannot do much about any of that … and that the LORD can.  So I need to ask for help.  You need to ask help.

I have found some comfort in the good company I keep with respect to wanting to pray more effectively, in a way that is pleasing to God.  The disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.  It obviously did not come easily to them either.  Jesus gave them what we know as the Lord’s Prayer.  “When you pray, pray then like this …”  We say the Lord’s Prayer every week as a congregation because Jesus taught us to pray in this way.  As with so many things, it is possible that this can become routine, words spoken not from the heart but out of habit.  But this prayer is such a rich expression of all that we ought to desire that I believe it is good for us to know these words, to pray them, and to understand what we are asking for each week.

It is in this vein that I am preaching through the Lord’s Prayer on Sunday evenings.  We are walking through the prayer, phrase by phrase, seeing from the Scriptures how each phrase has depth of meaning that one might not initially think about when he / she speaks the words.  As a helpful reference, we are using the Heidelberg Catechism as a guide.  Here is an example of the teaching provided in the Heidelberg: